Brazil’s Congress: Paying for Consensus

Brazilians have a saying, that every corruption scandal “ends in pizza.” The malfeasant and the enforcer settle things by sharing a meal and leaving behind what brought them together in the first place. Unlike other Latin American elites, the Brazilian elite peculiarly tend towards consensus as opposed to hot-headed conflict. Rather than incriminate each other, they let each other off. Rather than fight, they separate.

The Brazilian Congress: Consensus or Collusion?

Parties Galore

There is no place that reflects this behavior more powerfully than the Brazilian National Legislature. No one has ever been legally sanctioned for an ethics violation in the Brazilian Congress, despite legislators’ infamous shenanigans. Call this facet of political inaction, “impunity through consensus.”

When there are 23 parties to point the finger at, it’s kind of difficult to assign blame. What’s more, nine out of ten parties don’t have a chance of winning a presidential election, so they’re willing to take a hit to their reputations once in a while. Hence Brazil’s Congress understandably gets away with things that simply would not fly in other democracies.

Today, the government’s majority coalition in the Chamber of Deputies blackmailed the President it nominally supports. Legislators threatened to bring Congress to a standstill if the President does not disburse the remainder of the 2009 budget, what they refer to here as “the rest to pay” (“restos a pagar”). Because of the slow pace of contracting, previous years’ budgets leave residuals. This year it’s almost US$3 billion dollars, or $4.6 billion Reales. These funds are typically used to buy political support through pork-barrel spending, but Rousseff declared she would end the disbursement of contracts on June 30th. Party leaders, however, warn that this course of action will be met by a general strike: the President’s urgent legislation will simply not be voted on. This legislation includes the infamous decree, 527/11, which aims to expedite building and infrastructure contracts for the 2012 World Cup and 2016 Olympics (at the cost of transparency).

Demanding pork in return for not stonewalling the President’s priorities pays homage to traditions of consensus-making: most every legislator in the governing coalition is holding strong to the threat of blackmail. At least they have not threatened to vote against the President’s priorities.

Avoiding Internal Conflicts: Start a New Party

The inertial pull toward consensus is so strong that instead of having parties rife with infighting, you have breakaways– new parties, which eventually cooperate with the parties they left, forming voting blocks. There are now 23 parties in the Chamber of Deputies and counting. The illustration presented includes a few salient voting blocks.

The newest breakaway party is the PDB, which split from the DEM following its involvement in a vote-buying racket in the Federal District. Now Marina Silva may start her own party, reports the Globo. Silva is the Green Party (PV) candidate who garnered more than 20 million votes in the 2010 presidential election, placing a solid third. The presidential candidate and her allies object to the way the party is run: the Greens’ 12-year president, José Luiz Penna, controls appointments and chooses candidates undemocratically, without primaries. Perhaps more importantly, Silva objects to the alliances the PV has been forced to make in order to exercise any political clout.

Consensus at a Cost

Unsavory alliances are the price to be paid for a party system that privileges consensus over other priorities, such as accountability and responsiveness. The largest party in the Chamber of Deputies has 17 percent of the vote (the PT), forcing the President’s party to make deals with multiple others. Loyalty tends to be skin-deep. Political scientists have blamed the pork-based consensus-building process of the Brazilian Congress for bloated budgets and slow policy-making. The perks of a system built on consensus may also explain why legislators have resisted accountability measures, such a freedom of information law. Senators have preferred to cloak Brazil in secrecy than than reveal past and present abuses. They defend the peace, the reigning consensus– but at a great, great cost.

I think Thatcher had it right:
“Ah consensus … the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?” and
“Consensus is the absence of Leadership” – Margaret Thatcher

The hard part here is that this is truly cultural and thus basically unchangeable in any one lifetime. No event is great enough to facilitate this sort change to a culture. Even if they loose the World Cup and the Olympics, which is a real possibility, they consequences will not change the way people in government do things. In fairness I will note that the democracy is still young here and perhaps this is a vestige of decades of military dictatorship. Perhaps some dramatic/traumatic events will consolidate politics here at some point, that or we’ll get ourselves a good old charismatic dictator and he’ll consolidate the parties.